RE: Response: Sorry Libertarian Anarchists, Capitalism Requires Government
@modprobe, wow, excellent post. Your response is very well written and I think you hit the nail on the head about Binswanger's separation of force from economic activity.
What exactly do you mean by "ex nihilo" in your definition of government? Binswanger may think that the rights of the government come from an agreement of some kind of majority of people with each other, not out of nothing. You may largely be disagreeing on words and definitions, as you suggest is possible.
Also, would he agree that he is making
the assertion that any human organization can exist as an objective, philosophically consistent entity?
I do think this assumption often lurks in the background of statists' minds, but it's more complicated than that! He mentions the "genius of the American system" - checks and balances, so does he think it's possible to create a system that is forever correcting itself so that corruption never subsumes honest governing?
For me the word "value" is crucial. It encompasses outcomes and situations that people find desirable, and security is one very common (nearly universal) value that individuals hold. Anarcho-capitalism is an attempt to allow value to flow freely. If the organizations that spring up are really incentivized to preserve security, then the competition for less violence that you mentioned ensues. Regular government sets up a conceptual system of fixed values that (however many) people hold, hopefully at least puts in place a mechanism for change and growth of the value system, and tasks some people with enforcing it.
Thanks for making me think about politics today!
Ex nihilo means "out of nothing," and in particular I am using it to refer to an assumption of superior, asymmetrical rights (rights I have over you that you don't have in kind) that come from absolutely nowhere. If I claim ex nihilo rights, I'm just claiming they exist, but I can't explain why or how I got them in any philosophically consistent manner. The point here is exactly that there isn't some contract or consent from which they arise.
I think he must necessarily be assuming that an organization called government can, for some nonzero period of time, be completely objective. He talks a lot about "objective laws," but that's silly: fiat laws (laws created by humans) cannot be objective, by definition: an inherently limited and subjective creature created them. Objective laws do exist (those that govern physics, cause and effect, math and logic, etc) but humans don't create or influence them.
I believe you can think about two views on government's origin, shallow and deep.
So you have shallow ex nihilo, which would mean "we rule, because we rule, we don't need to tell you why". But there are many states that claim their origin comes from things like "will of God" (medieval kings), "will of people" (modern democracies), etc. Many people don't consider them ex nihilo then, especially if they support the system. I find them as 'ex nihilo' as any other on deeper level. There are no things like "will of people", "will of nation", we don't know of any god who approved someone's reign.
The bottom line is that each government's "rights" to govern are made up, one way or another.